The Rules of Engagement

by Anita Brookner

  And yet whenever I thought of that room in Paris, as I sometimes did, puzzling over the fact that it had given me so little pleasure, I seemed to see Betsy in it, resolutely happy, as she always was, and, knowing that her good faith would at some stage be put at risk, I had an impulse to protect her, or perhaps to wish on her some of my own impermeability. I did not, until a much later stage, question the fact that in my mind’s eye it was Betsy who inhabited the room and not myself. I was outside, in the lawless streets, while she, in her quest for a home, had accepted this setting, embracing what was handed on to her without the slightest feeling of discontent or incongruity. She was a romantic, as I was not; she was even a serial romantic. No discouragement could deflect her high hopes, even when it had been demonstrated that these were not appropriate.

  I caught up with her again as I was circling the room to say goodbye to my wellwishers. ‘How is Mme Lemonnier?’ I asked her, attacked by a brief passing nostalgia for Paris where I had learned my lessons of self-sufficiency. Suddenly this absurd setting—the flowers, the dressed-up guests, my mother’s high-pitched laughter—seemed intolerable. I longed to get out into the air, preferably by myself, and to take a long walk in the cooling evening.

  ‘Oh, but I’m not there any more, or shan’t be in a week’s time. I’m moving to the rue Cler.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘No. I’ve met someone, you see. Actually I’ve known him for a couple of months. A few of us used to get together to talk about the situation in the universities. There’s a lot of that going on at the moment, now that we’re looking for a way forward.’

  ‘And this group, I take it, has a leader?’

  ‘Yes, a former teacher. Well, I suppose he still is. He’s a philosopher, a communist. Very prestigious, very charismatic. Roland.’

  ‘And is he your friend? The one you’re with? In the rue Cler?’ This last I hazarded at a venture. It was hardly my business to interrogate her, though she was obviously willing for me to do so.

  ‘My friend, as you so tactfully put it, is Daniel. And yes, we are together.’ Her smile grew radiant. ‘We might even get married. I’d like you to meet him.’

  ‘Of course. You must bring him to dinner. We’ll be back from Venice on the twenty-fifth. You’ll give me a call?’

  ‘I’d love to. I have to come to London to put the house up for sale, probably next month. Now that I know I’ll be staying in Paris.’ The smile seemed destined never to leave her face. ‘It’s only small, the rue Cler, I mean; really only an attic with a cabinet de toilette. But when I’ve sold the house we can look for something a bit more substantial.’

  ‘You wanted to be an interpreter,’ I reminded her. ‘Has that all gone by the board? What does Daniel do?’

  ‘He’s still a student. He was very active in the protests. He’s a year younger than I am.’

  And you are twenty-five, I reflected. My age. I felt Digby’s hand on the small of my back. ‘Time to move on, I think,’ he said. Maybe he feared an exchange of confidences.

  ‘Don’t forget,’ I said, as he steered me away. We had both been dismissed. Girlhood friendships were no longer to be my lot. When I got to the door I looked round and waved to her. She must have been waiting for me to do so, for she raised her hand at exactly the same moment. Then I was moved towards the lift that would take us to our room, and to married life. I gave a thought to the discrepancy that Paris had brought about in our respective lives, and briefly regretted the lack of romance in Digby’s veined hand unlocking the door.

  ‘I’d love a cup of tea,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand champagne in the middle of the afternoon.’

  ‘I’ll order it,’ I said. That was my first attempt to make him comfortable, in what was clearly a relatively uneasy situation. He was tired, and it showed in his face. He looked nearly as old as my father, whom I had not managed to thank for all the fuss. As we drank our tea the strain we both felt slowly dissipated. We had baths, changed into simpler clothes, decided to go out for dinner, and let the rest of the day take care of itself. We were due to catch an early plane the following morning, and would probably appreciate an early night. That was what Digby said. I envisaged a succession of early nights, in which nothing very remarkable would take place. In this I misjudged him, and was pleasantly surprised.

  But when I woke briefly in the night, or rather in the early morning, what filled my mental horizon was the image of love in a garret, in the sort of Paris that had not been disclosed to me, or rather that I had been incapable of seeing. This mental Paris was the Paris of those foreign films that had been the main feature of my solitary afternoons. It was those images that returned to me now, with Betsy’s face imposed on that of the female lead. And for the next few minutes, or for as long as the scene lasted, I was aware of myself, a spectator, sitting in the audience, while outside the sun shone down on a Paris I had never known.

  3

  MY MOTHER EMBARKED ON WHAT PROMISED TO BE AN endless series of cruises and my father decamped to an alternative domestic arrangement in Crouch End. I was left alone with my new husband, whom I continued to find perfectly agreeable though in some ways disconcerting. Given his age he was rather more old-fashioned than I was, and proved to be fussy about his personal comfort, seeming to view his wife largely as an adjunct to what was already a well-regulated life, his business taking priority over everything else. I had had a foretaste of this in Venice. Sitting on the steps of the Redentore while Digby took a nap in the hotel, I told myself that I was free to make plans of my own in the fairly long intervals when he was absent, either physically or mentally, but I had no clear idea what these might be. Reading the papers I could not help but be aware of the enormous strides women were making; they were vocal and radical in a way I knew I could never be, but there was a discontent, even among the most liberated, that I felt summoned to share. I was still young, young enough to wish for something fiercer than the life for which I had settled, or to which I had succumbed.

  The attractions that this marriage had offered did not fade, but they receded. When Digby came home in the evenings he was tired (he seemed to me inordinately tired) and given to airing his business concerns. ‘But you don’t want to hear about this,’ he would say. ‘Tell me about your day. What have you been doing?’ Or he would ask me whether I would prefer Paris or Rome for a spring break. I respected his attempts to entertain me and summoned up an enthusiasm I did not feel. Or he would suggest a dinner party, again of an old-fashioned type, to which the same people always came, friends of his with whom I strove to find something in common. These people, the Johnsons, the Fairlies, seemed to know more about my husband than I did. They never failed to congratulate me on my cooking, and then picked up the conversation where it had left off during my absence in the kitchen. My role was a subordinate one. Fortunately my reserves of silence were sufficient to enable me to repress any awareness of boredom. But it was there: I felt it, and I knew that I must be on my guard.

  In the daytime, when Digby was at his office, I walked, though I hardly saw my surroundings, those dull, almost handsome streets and squares, where I might encounter a neighbour, on the same shopping expedition designed to furnish a quiet afternoon. After an unexpectedly radiant February the weather had turned cold and cloudy; there was no pleasure in these walks but they were my harmless way of damping down any incipient dissatisfaction that I might have felt. I was aware of the paradigm shift between my life in Paris and my life in London, which might prove to be as uneventful in the future as it was in the present. In Paris, despite the solitude, I had been aware of my strengths: I had been mature then in a way that now threatened to desert me. In my empty stoical days, knowing myself to be excluded from more strenuous pleasures, I had at least formed a notion of how life might be, whether or not I managed to negotiate some sort of admission to it. I had been unawakened but incurious, thinking it better to concentrate my attention on the display at a flower stall or the smells of coffee and wine issuing from a café. T
here was a democratic illusion of participation that I could no longer find in my new surroundings, which were, after all, not so very new. In fact part of the problem may have had to do with a sense of having been returned to the scenes of my childhood and adolescence after a brief foray into adulthood. For the sense of exile I had experienced in Paris had a maturity about it which I had begun to recognize at the time: perhaps adulthood is a sense of exile, or rather that in exile we are obliged to act as adults.

  Here in London, wandering by the river in a cold wind, and knowing that my time was my own until my husband returned and asked me what was for dinner, I could no longer summon any enthusiasm for my preparations, though these were as careful as ever. Throughout that spring I settled into a sort of benign numbness which I took to be contentment, or rather which I willed on myself. I too began to work up an enthusiasm for distant places, and presented Digby with travel brochures and books from the library which illustrated the beauties of Apulia or Turkey or Corfu. These served as conversational fare, and vague plans were made to visit all or any of these places. At the same time, as soon as the table had been cleared, I knew that Digby would take the evening paper into the other room, switch on the television, and fall asleep. He slept heavily, more heavily than I did, and seemed unable to invest any energy into keeping awake. I was careful not to disturb him; I laid aside the travel brochures and picked up a novel, Vanity Fair or The Professor. I thought that I might seek out a few evening classes, educate myself in something like the Victorian novel. Those I had read were a source of endless fascination. How brave the female characters were! How noble or resolute the men! I told myself that that was why novels were written, to give ordinary men and women a better idea of themselves, and, more important, to show how fate might take a hand even when the given circumstances appeared to militate against a significant outcome. On my walks I had noticed a school building which advertised some sort of programme of tuition for adults, and I had even lingered by the school gates, suddenly homesick for a much earlier time. To be part of an attentive group once again seemed to promise companionship of a kind in which I knew myself to be lacking. If this were regression, I did not much care. It would be part of the general regression signified by my obedient child-like wifeliness. Even I knew that the submissiveness of those Victorian heroines had nothing to do with weakness; on the contrary they were fearless, those women, as perhaps I had once been, even in Paris, where there was no one to mark my heroism. There was a lesson there for me. I mentioned the idea of evening classes to Digby, but he demurred. ‘I like to see you here when I get home,’ he said. ‘I look forward to it all the afternoon.’

  It was true that he was an attentive husband. I was not able at the time to evaluate the limits of normal attentiveness before it spilled over into watchfulness. He needed to know where I was at all times of the day; I knew that even if I achieved his permission to attend evening classes he would insist on driving me to the school and no doubt be waiting for me afterwards. He did not quite believe me when I told him that I had spent the afternoon walking, and once I had even caught sight of the car which must have been following me. Though I did not know this at the time, there were moves at the office to demote him from his present functions and to make him some sort of honorary chairman. This enabled him to spend hours away from his desk, so that on certain afternoons we might even have been circling one another on our solitary excursions. When I became aware of this it struck me as exceedingly odd, even bizarre, but I gave no sign that I had noticed this behaviour. I knew that he was conscious of the discrepancy in our ages, that he feared and distrusted all the feminist propaganda which was so widespread at the time, and that in an unacknowledged part of his mind he even feared that I might seek pleasure elsewhere and betray him. I think that is what men most fear: betrayal. Therefore I made no mention of the fact that I had seen the car, merely welcomed him when he came home in the evening after what might have been a normal day. For we both maintained the fiction that he was returning from the office just like any other husband. I got used to this, but it made me uncomfortable.

  He loved me. That was what had always impressed me. He loved me rather too much, in ways I could hardly accommodate. He was occasionally impotent, which increased his vigilance. Neither of us alluded to this; I knew that any such allusion would be a mortal affront to my husband, whose ardour was growing more desperate. Our nights, in that dark bedroom, were often silent, though not restful. I assumed that Digby had known physical passion for his first wife, had maybe not envisaged a resumption of it, but had substituted some form of ideal domesticity as a realistic alternative. He made occasional attempts to appear younger than his age, which was the age of retirement for most pursuits, and then gave up, and took a certain pleasure in giving up, disappearing with his newspaper, watching television until he dozed off, while I resignedly read my book and began to awaken to a sense of bewilderment, of dissatisfaction, even of resentment. Only in two different circumstances did Digby reveal a more interesting side to his nature. One was his attitude at our usual monthly dinner parties with the Johnsons, the Fairlies, when he would be genial, hospitable, generally admirable. The other, unfortunately, was in the course of those secret afternoons, when, out of the corner of my eye, I could see the car disappearing round a corner as I approached from the other end of a quiet street, with no sign of greeting or of recognition from either of us. This was Digby’s hidden self, compounded of anxiety and suspicion. He seemed to be preparing himself for my eventual desertion. In this he was more prescient than I was. I never did desert him, but I think the idea was in his mind most urgently as we circled each other in the unsuspecting afternoons. His only reference to these activities was oblique and neutral. ‘I don’t want you to feel lonely when I’m at the office,’ he would say, as if he had verified my solitude, seen it with his own eyes. ‘Why don’t you ask a friend round? One of your old friends?’ I knew he meant safe schoolgirl friends. ‘It would be company for you.’

  But I had no friends. My neighbours in Melton Court were stately large-bosomed widows, or so they seemed to me; there was no possibility of my inventing a friendship with any of them. Nor were the Johnsons and the Fairlies any more approachable, though Digby thought them suitable companions for me. They were his friends. He had been at school with Alan Johnson, while Fairlie was his broker. Their unliberated wives were largely silent; they had learned their place. Margaret Johnson was always kind to me, complimenting me on the poached salmon or the navarin of lamb, and I responded to her kindness in a numb fashion, having no chance to respond in any other way. Constance Fairlie was rather different, and, I suspected, not kind at all. Small, dark, and sardonic, she was tacitly given permission to interrupt her husband, to demand attention, to wait with a cigarette between her long fingers until he lit it for her, and to view me with an amused insistence which seemed to me to hold little indulgence. I may have had hopes of the Fairlies, largely on account of their Victorian names, Constance and Edmund, which I thought sufficient pretext for a discussion of Middlemarch or Pendennis, but when I ventured a perhaps too hopeful introductory remark to this effect, no notice was taken of it and I was made to feel foolish. Constance Fairlie considered me lazily through the smoke of her cigarette before informing her husband that they must not be late. She was rude, with the rudeness of a moneyed woman who was wealthier than her husband. Even though I was, I thought, better-looking, and with no stain on my conscience apart from that unhappy marital secrecy to which I should never refer, I felt diminished by comparison and more than ever conscious of my subordinate status. It occurred to me that she was fortunate in having Edmund for a husband, for even in my dormant state I could see that he was attractive. On one of these occasions I stole a longer look at him and conceded that he was almost handsome. But my gaze was objective, dispassionate. Surveying the wreck of the table as my guests moved into the drawing-room for coffee I concluded that the evening had gone well, as always, but that I still had no friends, m
ore, that I was actively lonely, but so well-trained that I gave no sign of this and at times was hardly aware of it myself.

  For these different reasons I was extremely receptive to Betsy’s voice on the telephone the following morning. She was in London to sell the house, she told me, and she was not alone. That was how she always put it: ‘I am not alone.’ Daniel was with her, and she would love me to meet him. Of course, I said: why not bring him round to tea this afternoon? By the way, what is his name? I’ve only heard you call him Daniel. Saint-Jorre, she said. Daniel de Saint-Jorre. We’ll see you this afternoon. I’m so looking forward to it.

  Great physical beauty is extremely rare. In those days, the days of which I speak, men were divided into the young and the no longer young. Now the middle-aged are spurred on to greater acts of youthfulness, as if the depredations of age could for that reason have no purchase on them. But Saint-Jorre was truly young, in a fashion that called into question any other category. And he was beautiful, with a lithe mythical beauty that brought to mind certain classical statues seen in reproduction, as if only now was I face to face with the real thing. If he lacked true classical qualities it was because he was never in repose. After greeting me, rather perfunctorily, I thought, he sat down for only a few minutes before getting to his feet again and roaming round the room while Betsy explained their plans, or perhaps her plans: she was selling the house, they were staying temporarily in the rue Cler until they were able to find something big enough for the comrades to gather every evening in pursuit of their nebulous ideals. I tried to get her to elucidate these ideals, and she may have done so, but I was too distracted to understand them, or perhaps she no longer understood them herself. Saint-Jorre was restlessly on his feet, and humming under his breath. ‘Do sit down,’ I said, exasperated. He ignored me. ‘You have all this space?’ he asked incredulously. ‘For the two of you?’ I saw nothing wrong with this. Of course he was a communist, or something like it. I pointed this out to him. A Marxist, he corrected me. And what does that entail, I asked him. ‘Structures,’ he replied. ‘New structures. Long overdue. Don’t you agree?’ His tone was obdurate, as was his expression. I realized that I was not worth bothering about, not even worth converting. He obviously considered himself a leader of a sort, as his looks proclaimed him to be. It was clear to me that he had no thought of earning a living in a humdrum way, as my husband did, as everyone else did. He was the movement, the Zeitgeist, powered by the intoxication of recent events. This was in the 1970s, when those events were receding into the background. No doubt the money Betsy received from the sale of her house would solve immediate problems of subsistence. And no doubt she would find other ways of securing his wellbeing if and when that money ran out. As I was beginning to perceive, one pays a high price for a man as prestigious as he so clearly was.